Good news from theKompany.com keeps pouring in. As several of you have pointed out, the first beta of Aethera has been announced. In case you haven't been following, Aethera is theKompany's fork of the greatly hyped/anticipated Magellan project. Beta 1 of Aethera sports POP3, SMTP, HTML, DnD, a contacts interface, sticky notes, and more. IMAP, Calendar support, etc are promised for the next beta. There is no mention of the license although source is available from the website -- most of the source files seem to be under the BSD license. For more details on Aethera, Kevin Reichard also points us to this favorable review on LinuxPlanet by Dennis E. Powell. Be sure to check out the screenshots as well.

We don't even want to touch RH 7 with all the problems it has. Hopefully someone can help you with the compile. I'm sorry your having trouble with it (send RH a reprimand for using the pre-alpha glibc).

If you do get it compiled and can make an RPM, let us know and we'll put it up with the others.

I just got the sources and compiled Aethera on my RedHat 7.0 System. First of all: WOW This looks way cool. Good Job. I'm sure it will eventually be the program of choice for all my mail thigs. Got to play with it a little more, though.

Compiling on RH isn't that much of a problem. At least ist wasn't for me. There are two files that need to be changed. Only #include stdlib.h (the brackets are missing. I wish I knew, how to quote them to get them through the html filter...) has to be added in the following files:
vtimezonecomponent.cpp
setupwizard.cpp

I use RedHat 7 fully up2date and compiled Aethera with KDE2.1 from CVS 17 Jan 2001 - 17:00 CET. I encountered no further problems and the application seems to run quite stable.

Once more, congratulations and a huge thank you to the kompany for once again bringing us great apps!!!

Hmm I never made any RPMs myself but if wasn't too much of a problem I would happily provide some if someone could tell me how to do it.

Please stop this FUD. There is nothing wrong with RH7. The gcc-2.96 was the best quality available.

I wouldn't call it FUD when the gcc development team (including those that actaully work for Red Hat) say that it was a stupid thing to do, was against their wishes, and that it should not have been done.

Bull*!
None said it was stupid. It was a tough decision.
Every change Redhat made to gcc-2.96 went back to CVS. But in the end it was the only decision to have better Alpha, I64, C++ and more support.
Gcc would have broken the BAI anyway.
Do your homework and document yourself a little more.

If you want to call what I said bullshit, please say it. We are not children here, and censoring your own words to appear more civilized insults me more than a simple curse.

document yourself a little more.

Agreed. No one said it was "stupid"... however, the censure by the GCC steering committee was certainly negative in tone, and basically said: "No one should ever do that again". Which meant to me that they considered the inclusion of a compiler that produces "object files that are not compatible with those produced by either GCC 2.95.2 or the forthcoming GCC 3.0" a mistake, a.k.a. a stupid move.

Please stop this FUD. There is nothing wrong with RH7. The gcc-2.96 was the best quality available.

I wouldn't call it FUD when the gcc development team (including those that actaully work for Red Hat) say that it was a stupid thing to do, was against their wishes, and that it should not have been done.

The latest Redhat compiler (2.96-69) is good enough to compile every other KDE application on the planet. And glibc 2.2 final is now standard from "up2date" - the same version that's in the latest Debian among others.

The problems I've seen so far:

- stdlib.h isn't included in 2 files, causing GCC to error out (it now considers unprototyped functions a problem at the warning level Aethera's makefile uses). Having your includes in order is good practice even if you're using a compiler that doesn't whine.

- A ton of icons are defined as static and not used.

- Aethera appears to be incompatible with KDE 2.0.1. The constructor to KApplication isn't what it's expecting. I'm pretty sure this isn't a compiler problem either.

Once I figure out the right way to fix that last problem I'll continue onward (I still don't have it compiled properly yet).

Well, I think you should read the lines at the Magellan site. It basically says that the Kompany took the code of and didn't contribute back to Magellan. See http://zamolxe.csis.ul.ie/faq.html#9

Not that I'm negative to the Kompany but all it doesn't hurt to know.

I must also say that the Aethera looks really cool, what would be even cooler is if Gnome and KDE could use the same server for the Schedule/Calender part. Then it would really rock - so I hope someone that is openminded thinks about that.

This really saddens me. I had 3 developers basically full time working with Magellan for at least 2 months before things soured. I've not gotten into the particulars and I don't plan to, and I always praise Teddy when given a chance, and cleared up any misconceptions of the relationship whenever they have arisen. Teddy got a lot of work from us for Magellan, and since Aethera is open as well, he is free to borrow from it, which is what we said at the time that we terminated the arrangement.

I think if you look at the two projects you will see that they are vastly different in terms of look and stability and that is going to get even more pronounced as time goes on, and that is the underlying reason why we split off. Within a month there will be very little of the original Magellan code in Aethera.

As far as Gnome/KDE interoperability on the server, I guess we'll see where everything is once we get there, we've already championed some projects that support both desktops.

Congratulations on the release Shawn. Aethera looks amazing! I downloaded the source and noticed that the different Aethera views weren't kparts. Are there no benefits from making them so? I only ask because it seems like a cool thing that the mail composer, say, is a kpart that could be changed on the fly, or embedded into konqueror. This is not a critique by any means I'm just trying to learn about this stuff. Congratulations again.

That's an interesting idea. I know we would like to get some level of integration with KOffice, but I'm not sure what that is going to look like just yet, we need to get more of the application finished first.

a) Will there be a windows version of the client? (it would be very helpfull in mixed enviropments...)
b) Will the Groupware/Server part be open sourced as well??
c) Is there any plan for support Microsoft MAPI? (MS Mail , Exchange etc)

Funny you should mention that, we are almost ready with our first public beta of Rekall, which is exactly what you are asking for. It's probably about 2 or 3 weeks away from coming out, and the Python scripting won't be in the first release, but I think you will like it.

Really, it's almost getting funny -- it seems everytime someone tells you "I wish you would make Application X", your reply is "Funny you should mention that..." :) You really seem to have an eye for what people want, and if that's not the recipe for success then I don't know what is :)

I can't stress enough what a fantastic team of developers we have. When you contrast what we are doing, with the number of people and no external funding, to what some of these other companies are doing with their multi-million dollar investments, you are really struck by how incredibly productive the Qt and KDE environments are.

We have even more things in the works, but since I hate vaporware, we won't talk about them till they are about ready to release, or even when we release them.

The work you are doing for KDE is wonderful,
almost too good to be true. I hope your company
makes a shitload of money. But realistically,
how are you guys doing on that regard? Are you
making enough money to make all this possible,
and worthwhile from your POV in the future?

In any event, THANK YOU! You are one of the
coolest companies I have ever known.

I won't lie, it's a tight race. We've spent the last 18 months developing software and only about 6 months selling it. If people really like what we do then you can support us by buying software, even if you don't need it :).

I think that David's idea is actually briliant. This guys from theKompany are really doing a wonderful job writing a lot of useful applications. And for that they deserve to make a lot of money, since their products are much better than products from most of other "only-$-making" software companies. I recommend that, like David, everyone that reads this, buys some product from theKompany. This money would not be given to them out of mercy, but thanks to the guys from theKompany (and indirectly to all KDE developers) for making such great products.

(1) the "3 developers basically working full time with Magellan" have commited back about 40 lines of code (the project has over 100000); surely they've worked a lot, but not for Magellan.

(2) of course "borrowing" works only one way, which is from Magellan to Aethera, since Magellan is BSD-style licensed and Aethera is under the GPL (more restrictive). What Mr. Gordon states here is a practical impossibility, as we don't want to restrict the uses of Magellan nor transform it into a license mess.

hmmm...if what you say is true , than I believe tha the Kompany should at least Licence a copy of Aethra to Magellan team with the BSD Licence... as I see it it's the ONLY way to go if shawn wants to be OK with the ethical side...

I have to humbly disagree with you, ethics aside. The right to fork is one of the basic freedoms of Open Source. The BSD license is such that theKompany could even repackage Magellan and sell it commercially and closed. That's one of the things the GPL protects against. The Magellan team is free to re-license Magellan to be able to include code from Aethera, or they could even fork Aethera and call it Magellan.

well of course I agree this is the case, but I was talking about the ethics , and not the legal background. I think it's only proper to give them access to the code through their licence , since they gave them the base. That's just a good gesture , an act of friendship in my book...

I have avoided, and will continue to avoid airing the laundry about the Magellan situation. Teddy has his opinion of it and we have ours. I don't think it's productive to get into a pissing contest over this. I hope you all continue to enjoy the number of projects that we have delivered to the community.

Why? Because your arguments don't pan out very well in public. Re-licence your work back to Teddy. He is the one that really put the work into it. Do it because it's only fair, do it because you and the Kompany have honor, do it because you need to sell the PR.

Whats wrong with the GPL? Teddy can take everything he wants from the code as long as it stays GPL.

What if the Kompany used/will use code/patches from someone else who doesnt want to release under non GPL?

The GPL and the other open source license models are made for forking. The writer has to be acknowledged, but thats all. Contrary to people equating it to socialism, its simply an awful Darwinian system without any direct enforcement of cooperation/fairness.

I'm all for the GPL, and I wish all software could be released under the GPL. Look, all I'm saying is that the changes done by the Kompany should be given back to Teddy - to be fair. If the Kompany receives submissions from people outside the company wishing to keep their code GPL then they can; however, all code for the program written by the Kompany should be given back to Teddy for his use also. Everybody wins then - not everybody wins minus Teddy. A good conscience should make the Kompany not want to profit from all of Teddy's work if Teddy can't profit from their work.

Your point about the GPL is good; however, I think most KDE people are used to working with code that is under different licences. Right?

Sorry, but I disagree. The BSD license is specifically designed to allow this.
Apple can steal FreeBSD and sell it as Mac OS X and no one is upset, although it is a much larger borrowing of code than what has happened here...and they're not giving their changes back (i.e. Aqua GUI, etc.).
If Teddy doesn't like what theKompany did, that means he's using the wrong license and should switch to GPL.